Showing Emotion

Sep 22, 2024 | Blog, Method, Writing, Writing Craft

Continuing on with the Emotion Theme: We’ve all been there: reading a book, looking forward to the exciting bit where the hero(ine) really gets to show their chops. We know it’s coming, and we’ve been looking forward to it since we figured out that they’ve got to...

Bringing Emotion

Sep 15, 2024 | Blog, Method, Writing, Writing Craft

When I first started writing, I was told that if my character cried on the page, my reader wouldn’t. If I wanted to bring tears to my reader’s eyes, my character’s eyes needed to be dry while they were completely torn up inside. As with every “Rule” of writing, you...

Why rebuild the wheel? There’s a template for that!

Sep 8, 2024 | Blog, Method, Writing

Two of the most popular apps used in fiction writing are Scrivener and Plottr. Scrivener is incredibly powerful and wide-ranging having so many features most authors don’t even use half of them. Plottr is more simple but getting broader in scope all the time. The...

An Entrepreneurial Failure

Sep 1, 2024 | Blog, Business of Writing, Writing

According to the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, two-thirds of all startups fail. Another statistic cited is that 90% of startups fail within five years. Publishing companies are not only not immune to this, they probably start and...

Ugh, Marketing!

Aug 25, 2024 | Blog, Business of Writing

I think I know one, maybe two, authors who actually like marketing—and that’s out of over a hundred authors who I know. Marketing is the bane of my authors’ lives. Whether you are traditionally published or indie, you have to market the books you publish (unless you...

Writing Series

Aug 18, 2024 | Blog, Writing, Writing Craft

There’s nothing nicer than finishing a great book and then realizing that it’s part of a series. You know that you’ve got so many more books to read—yay! But what is it that’s holding that series together? There are different types of series: those where there’s one...